I was so excited to request and read this book based on the synopsis alone; a museum devoted entirely to showcasing objects referencing broken promises and betrayals, big or small. Ranging from photographs, a veil, a cake tin, a pillowcase, all have a unique and complex history. The novel focuses on Laure, who is the owner and curator of the museum, and weaves in and out of the past exploring the broken promise of her own life and a love story which was transformative and has defined her life thus far.

Although the premise was so interesting and sounded like the type of story I would absolutely love, it fell so short for me in so many ways. I’m disappointed that I didn’t enjoy this more but alas, what can you do. My main issue was the complete lack of connection I felt to any of the characters and the relationships. I felt that Laure was not the most interesting of characters and her whole arc just lacked direction in some sense. The parts of the novel in the past felt full of tension and was clearly building up to something, but overall the plot dragged on so much for me that I was mostly bored.

As well as the pacing being off, I also didn’t ‘believe’ in the love story between Laure and Tomas. I just found it quite underwhelming and I didn’t find myself invested in them the way I expected to be. I’m a sucker for a good love story and while this had elements I appreciated, I just couldn’t fully get into it.

What I did enjoy however were the parts about the museum itself and the exploration of the different items on show and the stories behind them. I feel like the novel would have benefitted greatly from having the museum be more of a focus rather than Laure herself, or perhaps a more evenly divided narrative. Although the novel is literally named after the museum, I don’t think it’s utilised to it’s full potential at all which is a real shame since it’s the best thing about the book. I also liked Paris as the setting and the descriptions of the city are just as romantic as one may expect but I liked it. I actually went to look up if such a museum of broken promises exists, sadly it doesn’t but there is a museum of broken relationships in Croatia and LA which sounds incredible. I definitely want to visit if I’m ever in one of those places!

I also thought the glimpse into life in Prague at the time was interesting. Having studied History before and having also read quite a lot of books in the time period, I had some knowledge of what life was like under the communist regime, but the novel includes some finer details. I liked that Buchan includes the importance of the marionettes in Czech culture for instance and the ways that the puppet shows were used as small acts of resistance and to send a message. The marionettes also link in to the plot of the novel and become symbolic and full circle which was a nice touch.

Overall, The Museum of Broken Promises kind of lives up to it’s name and was a disappointing read for me. My own feelings about the book aside however, I can see some people really enjoying this so I would still encourage readers to give this a try and make their own minds up.

There were two reasons why I chose to request The Museum of Broken Promises. Firstly, the concept of the museum reminded me of The Museum of Broken Relationships which I visited in Zagreb a few years ago.

Secondly, because I have visited Prague and other former communist countries and I find the history from that era interesting.

Laure was working as an au pair for a Czech family when she met Tomas, a dissident musician. Laure is naïve and finds it difficult to negotiate the rules of living in a country where everything and everyone is under surveillance. This is made doubly tricky by her suspicions that her employer, Petr, works for the Party.

Years later and a bitter and world-weary Laure is living and working in Paris. She spends her days running the popular Museum of Broken Promises and her nights tormenting herself with memories of her past.

I am not a huge fan of the romance genre, but I found myself becoming invested in the relationship between Laure and Tomas. However, I found the rest of the characters inconsequential.

The relationship between Petr and Laure seemed a little unrealistic to me and the time she spent in Berlin seemed like a bit of an unnecessary addition to the plot.

I found I enjoyed the chapters focusing on her time in Prague with Tomas, but all the other chapters were ones I wanted to skip over.

All in all, I wouldn’t probably buy it for myself but I know people who would enjoy The Museum of Broken Promises.

This is a funny old mish mash of a book. The idea of the museum intrigued me. People bring items that represent a broken promise - a tooth in a matchbox to represent an absent father, a bridal veil for a failed marriage. If the story had developed this idea it would have been a winner. However the timeline flips back to 1986 and Prague. Whilst this is an interesting time and place I was not set alight by the tale or the characters. They all seemed to be untrustworthy and not very likeable. I am still a little unclear on what happened, this could be that I was not wholly paying attention as the pace slowed in the last third and I am afraid I was reading to finish.

The opening of the novel is set just across the border in Austria, 1986. Laure, 20 years old, has fled Czechoslovakia and is waiting on the platform of an station in Austria for the arrival of her lover, Tomas, who’d be wearing the clothes of a business man, which he wasn’t, would have forged papers to justify his trip. The reader is told that this, the second station in Austria, had been chosen to be their meeting-point as security was less tight there than at the first station across the border. The reader is, therefore, from the outset of the novel, dropped into a dangerous, claustrophobic world where everyone is being watched, and no one can be trusted, and where the reality of a person may be very different from the façade.

Tomas doesn’t come. Her former employer, Petr does, and the reader learns that Tomas has been betrayed, and captured as a result. But the reader doesn’t know who betrayed Tomas, nor the outcome of his capture.

The story then moves forward to Paris today, and to Laure’s Museum of Broken Promises, in which visitors to the museum glimpse fragments of lives that had been shot through with a broken promise. As, it becomes clear, has Laure’s. The reader starts to discover the nature of the broken promise in Laure’s life by following the lives of Laure, Tomas and Petr Kobes in Prague in the mid 1980s.

Laure was hired by Petr, whose wife was ill, to look after his two children, initially in Paris and then in Prague where Petr’s work took the family. While in Prague, she is drawn into the world of communist intrigue and garish marionettes, a world in which she meets and falls in love with Tomas, a dissident musician.

Later, Laure moves to Berlin, and the reader sees her there in 1996, and after that, the reader sees her in present-day Paris, where she moves.

The story of what happened in Prague in the 1980s forms the body of the story, and is unfolded through what the reader is told about Laure's life in Prague, sometimes directly and sometimes through Laure’s viewpoint. Also, through her conversations in Berlin, where she again encounters Petr, and finally in Paris of today, through her musings over the museum’s exhibits, and her discussions with both Nic, who works in the museum, and with May, a freelance American journalist, who’d heard about the museum and had come there in the hope that Laure would agree to be interviewed by her.

Elizabeth Buchan always writes beautifully, and this novel is no exception. She has the gift of capturing the very detail that will take the reader to the place in which the moment is set. But whereas in her past novels, I’ve been drawn to the characters, and felt interested in their lives, I found it virtually impossible to care about any of the characters in this novel, and I found that the movement backwards and forwards between the different locations and different periods of time, was distancing and made the novel feel fragmentary.

In creating lives that were lived under a repressive communist regime, where characters, both major and minor, might well not be what they appear to be, the depth of characterisation and development of relationships between characters needed to make them into people who step off the page, and people whom one can understand and with whom, in some respects, one may be able to identify, seem unfortunately to have been sacrificed to the need to build up the political ethos of the three different environments in which Laure moved.

Many thanks to NetGalley for a free copy of this novel.

I lost interest in this book quickly. The synopsis made the book seem better than it actually is. Found it hard to follow!

I had high hopes for this one but it didn’t quite meet my expectations. It. Was an ok story and parts of it did interest me but unfortunately it didn’t keep me interested throughout.

I don’t want to give away any spoilers - but I do want to say this book is amazing. It’s so moving and each page is a perfect moment of literary genius. Thank you to the writer for this moving tale, it will stay with me forever. A must read for those who enjoy reminiscing and for those who can relate to loss.

Given the publication date is still some months off, this book will need some heavy editing if the early version I have read is anything to go by. In fact, I only managed about 8% according to the app. I was hopeful that it was just the odd typo but this book consisted of a lot of telling and yet, beyond the idea that there was a museum of objects that "had things to say", I couldn't tell you what the story was.

The writing seemed to swing from what seemed to be simple errors "A bunch of pigeons strutted over the roof next-door uttering their pigeon racket." (do we really need a second pigeon here?) to sentences that for me felt overwritten and slightly incomprehensible such as "She wanted to look out at the same vista, open the same shutters and turn to inspect the glass cabinets in which were enshrined the disquiet of those who sought resolution." I do hope that with another round of editing the text will become clearer and some of the telling will be removed. As it stands the reader alternates between feeling as though they are being led by the nose, with wording such as "Nic tapped into what the museum was about. He understood the objects had things to say. When she had first ushered him through the rooms, she had watched that understanding dawn on him." and "Clever Nic had become expert in managing Laure's reactions.", and feeling stupid when they can't follow a sentence (usually one which incorporated excessive bracketing).

In the end, as I found myself constantly looking to edit the book, I gave up reading it. Fingers crossed the kinks are ironed out in the final version.

I was looking forward to this so much but unfortunately it just lacked some soul for me, it felt like I was just going through the motions reading, I couldn’t connect with the story or characters sorry, for me just fell short. I am sure others will find it there cup of tea, but sadly not mine

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a free copy for an honest opinion

I loved the historical background and the style of writing but the story didn't keep my attention and it fell flat.
Not my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

This fascinating and intriguing story starts in 1986 as Laure Carlyle waits for Tomas to escape from Prague at the first train station stop in Austria after the Czechoslovakian border. It then switches to Paris and the Museum of Broken Promises and backtracks to Prague and Berlin in order to tell Laure and Tomas’s story. As a twenty year old Laure is employed by the Kobes family as an au pair to the two children initially in Paris but a few months later in Prague. Petr Kobes works for a Czech pharma company but how high is he in the Communist network that controls Czechoslovakia at this time and what exactly does he do for them? Laure meets Tomas while taking the children to a marionette show, he works at the theatre but is also a member of a dissident rock band ‘Anatomie’. Laure is drawn into a dangerous world of political resistance, surveillance and ultimately she pays a high price for her love of Tomas. The story is principally told from Laure’s perspective but some is told through Petr Kobes and there are several timelines, present day Paris, 1986 Prague and 1996 Berlin, post reunification.

I love the concept of the Museum of Broken Promises which Laure founds. This is a beautiful, poignant place as people donate a multifarious array of objects large and small, all with their personal stories of broken promises. Laure herself has exhibits including the Prague to Vienna train ticket from 1986. There is also a marionette which symbolises her time in Prague, they are very important in Czech culture and I like the way the author describes their performances as they seem to come alive. There is a lovely tender marionette moment at the end of the book which I find very touching.

Elizabeth Buchan captures differing moods and atmospheres in the varying cities. Laure’s walks through Paris contrast vividly with communist Prague and the difficulties of post wall Berlin. Prague is especially beautifully described as a haunting place which comes across very strongly. The difficulties and hardship of life in 1986 are well portrayed with tension ever present as the people are watched, the government is repressive and there is the danger of arrest for any dissidence and this is a very dark part of the story.

The characters are very interesting. Petr is an enigma- can he be trusted? Laure at 20 is naive and has no real understanding of the dangers, though why should she? She’s a lass from Yorkshire. However, the savagery of events in Prague force her to grow up and they cast a dark shadow over her life. The museum is her way of redemption. Tomas and his friends are very brave as they do have understanding of what they risk.

Overall, I love this book and I will take a lot away from it. It is a very moving and beautiful story, which is well written. The pace is a bit slow at times but I think this only serves to accentuate the dangers of life in Prague before the Velvet Revolution in 1989.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Atlantic Books, Corvus.

A fantastic idea for a book,and indeed a museum,but for me,unfortunately it didn't live up to its promise.
I felt fairly neutral towards all the characters,and I wasn't overly keen on the back and forth nature of the story.
It works sometimes. For me it didn't this time.